Information superhighway, Internet and diabetes

There is renewed interest in the application of information technology (IT) based techniques for improving the day-to-day care of patients with diabet es mellitus, especially since the Diabetes Control and Complications Trial (DCCT) has demostrated that intensive insulin therapy (IIT) can delay the o nset and slow the progression of diabetic complications. The use of IT to a chieve these goals, might help patients and physicians in the clinical prac tice and can help to contain costs. Telecommunications have been applied as telemedicine, but new challenges are now appearing for physicians and othe r health providers, for example telepreventive medicine. This paper outline s possible applications of computer devices and telemedicine ire the field of childhood diabetes. Nowadays a lot of different IT applications are avai lable. These can be used in hospitals for the analysis and processing of da ta in a hospital-based diabetes management system, used in diet and nutriti on, used for education and can also benefit people with diabetes whose acce ss to health professionals and/or conventional diabetes education is restri cted, However, there are numerous difficulties in implementing diabetes dat a collections and to help globalise health information. For this reason it could be useful to establish a multilingual home page for the global health network (http://www.pitt.edu/ HOME/ GHnet/ GHNet. html) on the Internet. T he World Health Organization (WHO) is also working for the establishment of standardized population-based incidence registries across the world now fa cilitated by the WHO Multinational Project for Childhood Diabetes, known as DIAbetes MONDiale or the DIAMOND project. Implementation and integration o f the Internet in the existing hardware and software is the future for heal th care. These systems should be implemented and everyone should be encoura ged to learn how to use the Internet in order to help health providers and patients to improve and facilitate diabetes care. (C) 1998, Editrice Kurtis .